a throwback post…3 tanka at GUSTS Winter 2013
should I
consider my missteps
to understand…
how the Milky Way ended
with me in this pond?
like layers
of sunlight among weeds
our words
thrive on silence…until gushing
we burst into flowers
the twisted twig
of an old cedar leans
Westward
as if the wind senses
my every longing
GUSTS Fall/Winter 2013 (Tanka Canada)
dust once, a haibun
Oh, the map I use? It’s uncharted and unnamed. It’s wild woods and volcanic rocks. There are lakes and rice field puddles but also marsh and hot spring pools, smoky from the depths. Unless ‘I find a flower I can name’, it’s hard even for me to find my way back. Birds sing and talk but mostly unseen except the owl. Sometimes, he reveals their name. I’ve taken notes but forget about them the moment I walk away. My map always seems new, uncharted and unnamed. I know it’s not good but maybe the owl will help someday somehow.
dust once…
somehow a chicken knows
some stones
Lakeview International Journal of Literature and the Arts August 2013
(a kind of short autobiography)
Meanwhile, I’m writing non-haikai* poetry–here’s my 14th
No. 14 (non-haikai) curlicues
who would imagine
a laced peace banquet of soldier ants
bowling over a strange lobster
as war winds whoosh in
tumbling half filled cups
meanwhile, hidden in bushes
a truce between magpies stalls
over recyclable ladles
beyond the gates
arthritic oak limbs crackle
as a diagnosis befalls
dusky walls about an orphan’s
spelling of melan chocolic
somewhere, a homecoming sergeant
with wounds missing skin eats a map
as devastation news
swarm on beaches where algae
turns toxic red dye
a moss hill rises on a hero’s nose
and on the street renamed Desire…erasures
in a battle manifesto
*nod to Johannes S.H. Berg, editor of bones, a journal for new haiku, who coined non-haikai rising as they do from a swarm of haiku. Tell me, what you think, will you please?
Updates: a few of my awarded haiku and recent select publication
recent awards
first tea with her—
cherry blossoms cloud
the skylight
Sakura Award 2014 VCBF Haiku Invitational
our breaths
suspended between skies—
monarch butterfly
honourable mention
2013 Diogen Autumn Contest
first dawn alone–
the widow eats his half
of the orange
First Place, free format category
Shiku kukai Sept 2013
recent select publications
dawn again–
parts of us unscathed
from war mongering
A Hundred Gourds September 2014
with a shredder
he talks of restoring
a broken vow
The Haiku Foundation Per Diem August 2014
shadows
in a burst of twilight
Luna moth
cattails May 2014
Haiyan debris…
a search team spots
an orchid
limp wind…
holding on to the sound
of our vows
#3:2 March 2014 A Hundred Gourds
moon’s rim…
fractions of what we yield
to each other
haiku news feb 17 2014 vol 3 no. 3
About
autumn wind
wondering about lilies
in a mountain pond
Tell me a writer who really gets a satisfying jornal, in Spanish a daily wage or its equivalent, and I’ll bare a spirit in constant bouts of doubtfulness. Does a writer earn more because of what he writes and how he does it? Or is a writer paid more or less because of who he is? Is it money or honor he expects to receive?
Ahhh … but money as wage, and praise or honor as reward would be too predictable, too common as Job lamented in the Book of Job. It is in these lines that read: “Is not man’s life on earth nothing more than pressed service, his times no better than hired drudgery? Like the slave, sighing for the shade, or the workman with no thought but his wages, months of delusion I have assigned to me, nothing for my own but nights of grief. Lying in bed I wonder, ‘When will it be day?’ Risen I think, ‘How slowly evening comes!’
Restlessly I fret till twilight falls. Swifter than a weaver’s shuttle my days have passed, and vanished, leaving no hope behind. Remember that my life is but a breath, and that my eyes will never again see joy.”
Not money but joy is the ultimate wage as the passage implies. And joy is not hard to earn for it is in everyday life if we have eyes to see, a nose to smell, fingers to touch, ears to hear–a heart beating. This to me, is how a writer earns a daily wage. His wages then take the guise of treasures his heart can transfigure into a universe of thought that taps into other hearts, that causes a swirl in the depth of other souls, or that makes wings to sprout on leaden heels.
Sometimes not joy but rueful, poignant moments are my pick. Take what I earned once: On my walk home in my neighborhood, I caught two clumps of snowdrops–such tiny blossoms smaller than fingertips that do not look up but shyly droop close to black patches on the ground winter has frozen. That afternoon in the frosty wind, they trembled as if ready to turn away and run but how could they? For that poignant moment on seeing the wintry rain beat on the fragile snowdrop–as if pushing it to go home now, go to sleep–I earned my jornal, my daily wage.
Once on summer walk, the crackle of dried leaves just hit me both like the laughter of children and sobs long suppressed. Neither one of them would resolve the dryness, but I recalled how each does bring tears: laughter for joy, sobs for healing that comes with the release of a dammed-up pain. My jornal that day came as two haiku.
Fall has since shortened the day and the heart begins to crave for lost space that it doesn’t even recall which or where. I feel that most treasures have turned into mush so much so I wouldn’t be able to sift them off the ground. Yet I caught the dying day yesterday–so glorious in the gold of autumn it opened a flip side of serene heaven. Blades of grass coated in diadems of rain that carpet the lawns render royal walks poor by imitation. A burst of red maple against an inky blue sky humbled me, a soul bragging about her skill to recreate beauty in words.
I suppose I’m taking Job’s reflections to heart. I’d rather not gloss over each day and look beyond what’s there, right before me, or else fragile as is my breath one day “my eyes may never again see joy” to write. With what then will I compare the eternal joy, the ultimate wage I await?
Yet for now, as other eyes hanker to make the invisible visible, I put a tag on some moments of joy. Like on seeing the snowdrops, I paid myself $200 as my jornal.
What could have been yours?
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